Territorial learning and childcare practices: exploring relations between territory and care in the intercultural training of Indigenous educators in Brazil

Abstract

ABSTRACT The article discusses Indigenous caring relations in everyday practices involving children, in which co-learning approaches, as well as peer-to-peer learning processes, are grounded in territory. We revisit a set of learning encounters that unfolded as part of the Intercultural Training Programme for Indigenous Educators in Southeast Brazil. The course is part of the Minas Gerais Federal University’s (UFMG) Faculty of Education where, since 2006, it has trained and qualified Indigenous teachers to deliver Primary and Secondary education. In the text we argue in favour of the ‘school for many’, highlighting the pedagogical possibilities that emerge from the course’s ethnographic focus and, more specifically, from two care-taking learning scenarios with and among children. The records of these activities allow us to envision an educational agenda that includes such topics, respecting and dialoguing with Indigenous cosmologies and traditions; one that assumes this dialogue to be a fundamental part of Indigenous peoples’ resistance and respect for life.